Miss Emily (7 page)

“There's no need to explain yourself to me, miss. I'm glad to see you back on your feet.” The milk froths, and I take it off the hob. “You're maybe like me, Miss Emily. I feel one way one minute, and
the next I feel the very opposite. I find it hard to keep up with myself at times. Is it like that with you?”

“Yes, Ada, I daresay it is.”

“Now, miss, I'll show you how to make a good Dublin soda bread.”

“Thank you, Ada.”

I set her to mixing and then let her knead the dough. Once the round is ready, I have her cut a deep cross in it.

“That'll keep the devil out of the bread, miss.”

Once the loaf is in the stove, we sit together, and I can see her spirits rise as sure as the bread is rising in the oven's heat.

“There are only a few places I ever seem to want to be, Ada. Here in the kitchen, making magic with flour and milk, and up in my room, scribbling words onto pages. Or, indeed, in the company of Susan. Is it wrong of me to want little more but these things?”

“How could it be wrong, Miss Emily? We must do exactly as we please in life. How else are we to be happy?”

“When I was a girl, I loved to gad about. But now sugaring parties and teas with ladies don't interest me. In fact, they unnerve me. I have a dread of being looked at. It has always been so, as long as I can recall. Mother blames herself for this. She sent me away as a two-year-old to stay with my Aunt Lavinia. She worries that I developed a fear of people when I was so rudely removed from all I knew. It may or may not be so. How can we know?” She leans forward and speaks intently. “Vinnie, Susan and I were at tea lately in town, and the cacophony struck me dumb. The din was hideous, and I did not feel I belonged. I felt sickened by probing eyes, as if I were an object with few dimensions. I knew that those strange to me did not see me
rightly.
Rather than be misinterpreted, I prefer not to be seen at all. I have concluded that the outside world—the one of people—does not bring me joy.” She flutters a
little, looks at me. “But what about you, Ada? Are you happy? You are so very far from your home, your family.”

“I am content, miss. I've taken to America very well. These past few months have been a wonder to me. And my uncle and aunt are more than kind.”

“Did your life in Ireland not suit you?”

“It suited me well enough, miss, but I always had a question about what lay far off. I couldn't rest until I answered it for myself. And Ireland has changed, miss. There aren't prospects like there used to be. A lot of people are leaving.”

“I cannot imagine being so removed from my family.”

I take out the bread; it is as golden and perfect a loaf as Mammy would make. Miss Emily hands me a broom straw—her favorite method for testing—but I take the knife I habitually use and stab it into the bread. It comes out clean. Then I knock on the bottom of the loaf and hear its hollow answer.

“If I didn't know you, Ada, your skill with that blade would perturb me.”

“Mammy used to say I would frighten the crows out of the trees when I was in a thundering mood.” I laugh. “But there's no fear of me with the knife.”

“Ada, you are like a breath from Madagascar.”

“You say the queerest things, miss.” I take the loaf and cut it into quarters. We have a slice each, the butter dribbling off it onto our chins. It pleases me to see Miss Emily content, eating a lump of soda bread, with something like a smile lurking around her mouth.

Miss Emily says November is the Norway month, but it has arrived in a burst of sunshine to thwart her. In the brightness of the
day, the yellow bricks of the Dickinson Homestead glow beside the gloom of the Evergreens, Mr. Austin's villa. I look up at its dour walls as I pass; how his wife and son can stand the dark of the place is beyond me. Though Miss Susan has a haughty air, I see how soft she is around Miss Emily, and that makes me warm toward her. She is devout, too, and goes often to church. Her husband is another thing entirely; he is what Mammy would call “a wicked-faced gent.” Who dreamt them up as a pair? I ask myself.

A cotton day moon lurks behind the trees as I walk toward the town. I am taking Auntie Mary to the Amherst House for a treat; she has not been feeling the best, and I mean to get a good dinner inside her, one that neither of us has had to cook. I have arranged to meet her at the inn. I walk across the common toward Amity Street, and I spot Auntie standing stiffly at the railing on the porch of the inn, waiting for me; she looks like the figurehead on the prow of a boat. I follow her gaze to the tiered water fountain and frog pond behind me.

“Ada! I thought you weren't coming at all. I was about to go home.” She trots down the steps to meet me.

“I'm not late, Auntie.”

“No, maybe you're not.” She sighs and rips off her gloves.

I link her arm, and we ascend the steps and enter the lobby. The restaurant smells sweet and bready; I squeeze Auntie's elbow. “This will be lovely now, Auntie Mary. It's not often you're waited on hand and foot.”

“There's a reason for that, Ada—I don't like being waited upon.” She unpins her hat, and we take our table; she smooths the linen with her hands and looks around, appraising the other diners. “Did they enjoy the bareen brack at the Homestead?”

“They did. Mr. Austin found the ring in his slice, which was
a shame, as he's already married. I was hoping Miss Emily or Miss Vinnie would come upon it in theirs.”

“Ah, I don't think either of them is for marrying. Sure Miss Emily barely goes out anymore. Wouldn't it have been grand if
you
had found the ring, Ada?” Auntie Mary grins at me.

I snort. “Sure who'd have me, Auntie?”

“Well now, you'd be surprised. A girl like you doesn't go un-noticed in a place like Amherst.”

I shrug, but truth be told I am as pleased as a dog with two pockets. And I hope that whoever it is she is thinking of is the same person I am thinking of myself.

We eat our meal with gusto, and Auntie Mary seems to fill out her clothes a bit better by the time we have enjoyed our soup, chicken and bread. I feel full up and glad, as if I have achieved something small but good.

Miss Emily Intervenes in a Family Matter

S
INCE
A
DA ARRIVED, THE HENS HAVE BEEN LAYING AGAIN
. Father styled her a sorceress recently, and he may be right. He was alarmed when she carved a grimacing face into a rutabaga and stuck a candle in it. She called it a “turnip lantern” and sat it by the stove. There it sent eerie shadows around the kitchen walls.

I feel that Ada has bewitched the hens with her Irish charm; she has used her sorcery to cajole them into laying, for since June they have done nothing so crude as produce an egg. I have heard her scold the fowl, calling, “Come out of that, you little slieveens,” to coax them from their boxes.

This morning I encounter Ada scouring through the deepest grass in the garden, her behind cocked like a bantam's. A light rain falls, but she dips and lifts, moving from patch to patch. I stand to watch. Before she places each egg into her basket, she raises it to her mouth and puts her tongue against the shell.

“Ada, what are you doing?” I call.

“Gathering a clutch of eggs, miss,” she says, with that guilelessness that all her kind use, though there is a certain sly element to it.

“You're licking them!”

“I'm making sure they're all right, miss. Mrs. Child says that if you hold the large end of the egg to your tongue and it feels warm, it's fresh. If it feels cold, it's bad.” She shrugs.

“Our beloved Mrs. Child.”

“It's a very good book, Miss Emily,” Ada says, a chiding tone to her voice.

“Well, I am glad of the abundance of eggs, as I mean to make a coconut cake for Susan, to comfort her in the last of her confinement. Women like to eat sweet things toward the end.”

“They certainly do, miss. My mammy spooned sugar into her mouth right before each of my sisters was born. She couldn't even wait to sprinkle it on her bread.”

I sit on the stone bench, though it is damp. “Ada, join me.”

“You'll get your end, Miss Emily, sitting in the rain with no shawl or bonnet.”

“And you, Ada, won't you get
your
end?”

“Not at all, miss. I'll go at the house like the hammers of hell shortly, and I'll be warmed up in no time.” She tilts her face skyward. “I like a soft day, miss. I can't get along with all that sun. My skin's not used to it.”

“I, too, love a drizzly day, Ada.”

“I had a letter from my mammy.”

“Was it a good letter? Did she send you news?”

Ada frowns. “Ah, Mammy is not great at the writing. It was mostly about her hope that our Lord will preserve me and that my workload is not too heavy. I wanted to hear stories of my sisters. Of the neighbors. Of home.”

“How many sisters do you have, Ada?”

“Seven. I'm the eldest.”

“How lovely! When I was a girl, I longed for more sisters, dozens of them. I made friends at school, of course, but Father
feared for my health and dragged me home so often that I could never settle into my friendships.”

“I was only a couple of years in school myself. Long enough to learn to read and write, I suppose.”

I spy Austin barreling toward us from the Evergreens. Ada sees him, too, and stands up. My brother stops in front of us, his face pinched.

“Hello, Austin,” I say, but he ignores me.

He looks down on Ada. “You are not in my father's home that his family may purchase leisure,” he says. “You are here to assist, and for that reason I do not wish to find you idling on my parents' time.”

Ada picks up her basket of eggs, and I rise to defend her, but Austin holds up his hand to me, so I do not speak. He turns and marches back toward his own house. My brother's eruptive nature pains me when it spills over in this way.

“I had better get back,” Ada murmurs.

“Little Emerald Ada. Do not look so morose.” Though Austin has maddened me, I defend him. “My brother is preoccupied with family matters and with work. His clients are demanding, and that makes him disagreeable, which in turn causes him to lash out. You were in his path, that is all.”

“No, Miss Emily, it is true that I was idling.”

Ada takes her basket and walks off; she prods again in the grasses. I watch her for a time, her deft bend-and-lift. I go to find Mother to urge her to tell Austin not to poke in our household affairs.

Mother, of course, defends her son. And what is worse, she castigates Ada for sitting outside “chitchatting.”

I seek Ada out in the cellar. “Try not to dwell on Mother's reprimand, Ada.”

“I've been taken up before for being too much of a talker,” she says, carefully laying the eggs into a straw-lined crate for storage.

“Ada, Mother was never a successful youngster, so she does not understand the youthful. Bear that in mind, and you will make better sense of her.”